We have talked with Yves Mulkers, founder of 7wData, to discover his experience as a publisher on how data helped him grow his editorial business. Read this SEO case study and discover how he gained a +60% on organic users acquisition.
Most people don’t get excited about data and very few would think that there is something exciting about it, but Yves Mulkers is an exception. Graduated in chemistry and then converted to the IT industry, in 2015 he founded the online magazine 7wData, which hosts trending news about the world of data and all its facets. 7wData’s purpose is to help people understand how data can work for them.
In fact, Yves describes his website this way:
“7wData is a blogging platform to foster innovation & matchmaker between people and products, and foremost is here to trigger your data appetite.”
Passioned about music, technology, and data, Yves started to join the dots of his own interests and career in his DJ days, trying to organize his major vinyl collection by building his own record management tool and CRM system.
He was always looking for tools and technology that support his vision and maximizing and optimizing his skills.
“Organizing, structuring, modeling, sharing knowledge and stories have been like a red-wire in everything I do where I like to inspire people with the things I do” he said.
How did the idea of 7wData come up?
I needed a place to share all the inspiration I get and gather, where I can gather my network around my favorite topic at the moment: data. When I started, we were still talking about business intelligence and data warehouses. The early days of the hype of big data, which would solve all our data problems.
7wData helps me to keep my network informed and inspired by what you can do with data, how should do it, and what value it can bring to you. It as well pushes me to stay on the forefront of what is happening in the market.
In your experience, what are the aspects that make people more curious about data, AI, and innovation?
Data is for most people not sexy, not tangible, it’s technical and has to do with IT and geeky stuff. But people slowly start to understand that with all this data, technology and mathematics we can be supported in our everyday lives. The time is now, that we can try a lot of things, very quickly, without major investments. Try many, fail early, and learn, compare it as how nature works and evolution of the species came about.
You are passionate about AI. How do you think these new technologies are changing online publishing?
AI will play an important role in automating the typical reporting like sports facts. Artificial Intelligence will allow finding relevant information in a speedy manner. It was big at the time when search engines started to arise, back in the 90’s.
Great to be able to find information in such an easy way, at the tip of your fingers. But seeing the huge volumes of information, it takes us more than ever to find relevant, meaningful information.
This is where AI will help us into be relevant and selective.
How are you using the data you produce with WordLift on your website?
My big vision is to build a one-stop place where you can find all information regarding data: inspiring stories, how-to’s, who-is, which products, what jobs are available and what skills do you need. This to help everybody from c-level to practitioner make the best out of data.
WordLift helps me build that knowledge graph and it also interconnects the content assets, with a minimal effort. At the same time, it prepares and optimizes my content for search engines and voice search, which allows people to find my content in an even easier way.
WordLift’s unique approach is the semantics it has on board. Most tools work only on the literal terms, whereas WordLift can identify for example A.I in a sentence, and knows it is the same as AI, Artificial Intelligence…
Can you already see WordLift’s effect on your website?
We are still in the evaluation phase, and remain skeptical, because things, working so well, always make us suspicious.
But to call it by the numbers, we saw in the first weeks of implementation a 30% increase in traffic compared to previous periods. To be honest, we never did any SEO optimization before.
Almost all our content is now wordlifted, and we still see a week-over-week increase.
If we compare to the same period last year, we see search traffic increase of 60%.
Wanna grow your website traffic using AI?
Key Takeaways
- For most people data is not sexy, but they are slowly understanding that it can support our everyday lives and our businesses.
- In the editorial business, AI will play an important role in automating the typical reporting like sports facts.
- It takes us more than ever to find relevant, meaningful information. Here, again is where AI can help us gathering the most promising news to focus on.
- Building a knowledge graph out of your website will help you turn your content into data points and interconnect the content assets, with a minimal effort.
- With WordLift taking care of semantic SEO, 7wData grew by 30% in the first weeks of implementation. After three months, organic users acquisition grew by 60% when compared to the previous period.